Community T&C

Last updated - 20th June 2016

Despite the fact that Focus Asia maintained no record of unwanted behaviour, we came up with this T&C to give more light on Dos and Don'ts in our Community.
The following Terms & Conditions apply to all Focus Asia members, paying and otherwise, who fall under a typical user membership.

Note: We will use "user" and "member" terms to describe everyone who is a member of Focus Asia Community.

By registering a member and corresponding membership with Focus Asia you agree to be held to the standards entitled herein and acknowledge that breaches of these standards may, at the discretion of Focus Asia Community staff, result in account suspension and membership cancellation with no entitlement to refunds, regardless of the forums refund policy statement.

Acceptable decorum

As a general rule Focus Asia Community expects a high level of professionalism and decorum from members. “Common sense” applies in the context of professionalism and this applies to channel posts, replies and private messages - both on Slack channel and Q&A Forum.

Flaming, trolling, sexism, racism, derogatory comments, immature behaviour and dissemination of deliberately inaccuarate or misleading information will not be tolerated.

Other users should be treated with respect and similarly, as a user, you should at no times be subjected to excessively demeaning, belittling, defaming or otherwise derogatory behaviour.

Focus Asia staff avoids censoring member posts and content but may choose to do so at the discretion of forum staff when user content is considered inappropriate or a large breach of decorum. Such incidences may or may not result in a warning depending on the level of infarction.

Incidentally, while Focus Asia Slack & Q&A Forum are a place of “free speech” and prefers to remain unbiased, we acknowledge and sincerely denounce sexism toward women in the affiliate marketing industry and will not tolerate discussions of on overly sexist nature, likewise extremely sexist comments, especially those directed at Focus Asia members. Similarly, derogatory comments against other members on the basis of gender prejudice are immature and will not be tolerated.

Both Slack channels and Q&A Forum are not a marketplaces for pitching to users, cold calling via PM or carrying out any behaviour that may considered spamming. Sending unsolicited private messages with the intent of drafting users to your company/product, initiating discussion outside the forum (e.g. email or Skype) for similar purposes, are not acceptable and these types of messages are quickly reported by users - who like us do not find PM span acceptable or tolerable.

The persistent usage of subtle hints at joining your network/service and dropping email & Skype contact details often in threads is also not acceptable behaviour. Similarly, behaviour clearly intended to provide little value with the goal of getting exposure of one’s signature is considered spamming.

Again here - common sense operates. If you are taking actions and contributing low-value content for the primary purpose of getting leads, you are probably spamming and users will sense it.

Unacceptable topics of discussion

Focus Asia has a diverse community and body of discussion. There are several scenarios where we may choose to remove or prohibit discussion, for various reasons:

Discussions of illegal, grossly unethical or malicious practices

Slander and libel - wrongful defamation of companies and people that could damage reputation and/or business. In some cases Focus Asia staff may intervene in discussions in order to protect users who become legally liable for their comments. E.g. affiliate wrongfully accuses vendor of extremely unethical or mailcious practices, provides no evidence, possibly does so out of personal spite and potentially damages that vendors reputation and business.

Hate speech, political activism and anti-religious discussion - this isn’t the place for this kind of conversations and is not discussion our users come here for, nor should be expected to tolerate.

Private Messages:

Unsolicited private messages to any of our members (or “cold calling”) promoting your company/product is strictly forbidden UNLESS the member has explicitly expressed interest in the company/product or has asked forum-wide to be contacted by any such company/product.

Acceptable forum access and fraudulent activity

As a user you are purchasing a membership for yourself and no one else. An account membership entitles the purchasing user alone to forum access with no specific limitation on device access, time limits, or concurrent connections, but with limitation to only several concurrent login sessions to allow multiple browsers/concurrent devices.

Some users may choose to share access with their team or partners. This is not strictly condoned but falls within acceptable use provided the number of concurrent login sessions remains within limits (which we set and can change at our discretion).

Note: for local networking events and those free to Focus Asia members only, a username and active account will be required per person.

Focus Asia Forum employs various analytical tools for tracking user activity, concurrency and security auditing based on a variety of data. By registering you acknowledge that we, at any time, may suspend your account if we have evidence of clear account misuse. This can be in the form of automated access and activity (e.g. scraping), excessive access and account sharing (e.g. group buys), suspicious behaviour such as user impersonation, brute force login attempts, mailcious activities such as hacking/vulnerability exploit attempts, and so on.

Any account suspensions for unacceptable use, fraudulent and malicious activity, will be permanent and not be eligible for refunds.

Account suspension

In all cases, breaches of forum standards as well as clear fraudulent activity will result in account suspension at the discretion of Focus Asia Community staff. No manual account suspensions are entitled to refunds and we reserve the right to suspend new accounts pending investigation that we believe are linked to previously banned accounts.

Refunds

As we require one-time fee to join our platform where user gets full access to chat, past posts and user's directory we cannot offer any refunds.

Intellectual Property and Copyright

Focus Asia Slack channel & forum are a discussion platforms populated by user-generated content. User-generated content ownership is often a point of debate, so the following basic operating rules are in place:

All content on the forum posted by a user is fully owned by that user.

However, since the content is posted within Focus Asia Slack and Q&A Forum, we reserve the right to abridge, quote and take excerpts from user content for use in other products owned by Focus Asia owners, Focus Asia public-facing sales and web pages, related events and the blogs. This includes translating content to other languages for the purposes of creating localised forums or blogs.

In all cases general tact and decorum is observed. We will not share highly exclusive or sensitive content without permission from the creator and will not disemminate user details or personally identifiable information, other than their Focus Asia username or first name.

Where content is considered high-value, staff will ask permission from users to use their content for other purposes.
At any time an Focus Asia member can ask to have their content removed from other sites/documents where they deem it inappropriate. In theses cases there will be a dialog between the user and Focus Asia staff to ascertain the nature of the request and to better understand what types of content usage scenarios may cause concern.